Services
From initial feasibility through to appeal, alongside standing strategic and policy advice for clients navigating a system that is itself changing. Every stage blends commercial realism with a forensic understanding of planning policy and procedure.
The arc of a project
Initial advice
Pre-application
Planning application
Planning appeals
The planning process is not simply a risk to be got through.
Where a scheme fails, it is usually because elements of concern were never properly identified and addressed. The value of early advice is precisely that — finding where the risk actually lies, and dealing with it in full.
Before committing to a scheme, it is worth knowing what it is actually up against, commercially as well as in policy terms. CivicScape assesses a proposed project against the relevant planning policy and any technical constraints, tests whether it is genuinely deliverable against the client's own objectives for the site, and sets a strategy designed to reduce risk and improve the chances of a positive outcome.
Pre-application work operates at two levels, and CivicScape brings direct experience to both.
That confidence is what counts: officer support for a proposal is often what carries it through the political hurdles that are inevitable in a scheme of any size.
On the strength of that commercial understanding, CivicScape promotes the scheme, identifies concerns before they harden into objections, and prepares a written case setting the proposal against policy and other material considerations.
An application is easy to mistake for a process. In practice it is a balancing act — three things held in tension at once:
CivicScape works with the design team as the scheme develops so that commercial and policy considerations are resolved together rather than in sequence, and manages the application through to a decision, representing the client's best interests throughout.
Sometimes an appeal is unavoidable. When it is, what matters is judgement, not familiarity with the procedure. Across more than twenty-five years, Jeremy has acted as expert witness for many clients, working directly with leading barristers across the country and across a wide range of schemes. That experience brings clear, informed judgement on how an appeal is likely to run — and on the documentation a successful case genuinely needs.
Standing advice — not a stage, but a constant
Planning policy does not stand still. The work here is to follow how the changes are actually taking place — from devolution to procedural reform and new legislation — and to turn that into a strategic review of where a project stands as they occur. The value is local: understanding not simply that the system is shifting, but how a particular change lands on a particular scheme, in a particular place.
The clearest live example is the civic-growth agenda emerging from devolution — the model Andy Burnham has called Manchesterism, and the thinking now poised to shape national policy as it travels beyond Greater Manchester. CivicScape has set out what it actually is, and what it will ask of the planning profession.
Read the analysis: Civic Growth, and why Labour says they need it →
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